A series of five day-long workshops for artists and practitioners looking to expand their practice into making work more inclusive to neurodivergent audiences, explore their own playfulness and creative processes and widen their understanding of communication, connection and interaction.
All workshops are designed and delivered by Max Alexander.
Each session will involve visual and verbal presentations, opportunities for sharing, discussion and asking questions alongside guided activities and opportunities for play. Participants will be encouraged to participate in ways that are comfortable and enjoyable for them. We understand that this will look and feel different to individual participants.
All sessions will be facilitated from and informed by a neurodivergent affirming and celebrating perspective.
10am – 3.30pm, Friday 20th September
Call to Play
Platform, Easterhouse
This session is an opportunity for participants to engage with and explore their own relationship to play. It will explore how play can help us explore and meet our sensory, physical and emotional needs as adults. Through a series of facilitated and guided discussion, reflection and play we will explore what play means to you, how you might play currently and what new or expanded forms of play might you bring into your life?
10am – 3.30pm, Tuesday 24th September
Expansive Communication
Platform, Easterhouse
This session will focus on expanding our understanding of communication. It will look at what communication can look and feel like from a neurodivergent perspective and what the barriers can be to meaningful communication between people of different neurotypes. We will look deeper into and beyond spoken language to explore other vocabularies and means of expression we can share.
10am – 3.30pm, Tuesday 1st October
Meaningful Connection and Interaction
Platform, Easterhouse
This session will focus on the forms that meaningful, accessible and enjoyable connection and interaction can take for neurodivergent people. It will explore different approaches to facilitating and engaging in different kinds of interaction with and between people with different neurotypes and needs. It will also look at what co-creation or collaboration can look like.
10am – 3.30pm, Tuesday 8th October
Sensory Access for Neurodivergent People
Platform, Easterhouse
This session will dive into what we mean by “Sensory Access” and “Sensory Needs” and what this can look like amongst neurodivergent people. It will explore working creatively with the senses to create gateways to playful, connected and accessible experiences and to remove sensory barriers to access.
10am – 3.30pm, Tuesday 15th October
Autistic Creativity and Play
Platform, Easterhouse
This session will look at what authentic and meaningful Autistic creativity and play can look like. It will draw on a wide range of autistic perspectives and experiences including Max’s extensive practice-based research into facilitating and enabling autistic play.
Max Alexander
Max Alexander (he/him) is an artist, playworker and creative facilitator who specialises in working with neurodivergent and/or disabled children and young people. Working as ‘Play Radical’ Max creates and co-creates spaces for play, exploration and connection with a focus on neurodivergent joy and ways of relating.
Max is passionate about access to artistic, playful and creative experiences for neurodivergent and disabled individuals and the idea of beautiful creative accessibility is at the centre of his practice. He has worked with numerous organisations in the arts, theatre and education to make their practices and services more accessible to neurodivergent and disabled audiences and uses writing to further explore and share ideas in this area.
As an autistic artist Max’s practice is a space to communicate in his primary language, which is inherently a sensory one. He creates playful objects and environments which offer different ways of interacting with people and the sensory world. He is drawn to repetition, pattern, movement and loves to dive deep into things that might seem mundane or insignificant to discover new detail, beauty and very often absurdity and humour. Max is currently very into light switches, sticks and the colour orange.
See PlayRadical.com for more about Max.
To sign up
Places are FREE to socially engaged artists in Scotland, thanks to generous support from National Lottery, Creative Scotland, Imaginate and Platform, Glasgow.
To sign up, please email access@independentartsprojects.com before Thursday 5th September at 6pm to request a place. Please include:
- Confirmation that you are a socially engaged* artist working in Scotland: please provide a brief summary of your experience (up to 50 words).
- A note of the session or sessions you are interested in attending, in order of preference.
Please note – if we have more demand than we have spaces, we will put names in a hat and draw them at random.
*By ‘socially engaged artist’, we mean an artist who works with groups of people or individuals in any artform as part of a series of workshops or in the creation of a new art work.
What will happen after you sign up:
- We will notify everyone who has emailed requesting a space by Thursday 12th September.
- If we can offer you a place on the sessions, we’ll request access requirements from you and any other information you’d like to tell us in advance of attending.
- We’ll send a session schedule and any information on what you’d need to know in advance.
- If you’ve any questions, please email us at access@independentartsprojects.com.
Places are free to socially engaged artists in Scotland, thanks to generous support from National Lottery, Creative Scotland, Imaginate and Platform, Glasgow.
Image credits
- Top image by Max Alexander
- Workshop photo by Geraldine Heaney
- Icons by The Noun Project
- Bottom image by Max Alexander